Showing titles in Evolution

To many of us, tropical forests are the domain of movies and novels. These dense, primordial wildernesses are beautiful to picture but irrelevant to our lives. Jungle tells a different story. Archaeologist Patrick Roberts argues that tropical forests have shaped nearly every aspect of life on earth. They made the planet habitable, enabled the rise of dinosaurs and mammals, and spread flowering plants around the globe. New evidence also shows that humans evolved in jungles, developing agriculture and infrastructure unlike anything found elsewhere.

How did we get here? All cultures have a creation story, but a little over 150 years ago, Charles Darwin introduced a revolutionary new one. We, and all living things, exist because of the action of evolution on the first simple life form and its descendants. In How Evolution Explains Everything About Life, leading biologists and New Scientist take you on a journey of a lifetime, exploring the questions of whether life is inevitable or a one-off fluke and how it got kick-started.

In the woodlands of sub-Saharan Africa, sometime deep in our species’ past, something strange happened: a bird called out, not to warn others of human presence, but to call attention to herself. Having found a beehive, that bird—a honeyguide—sought human aid to break in. The behavior can seem almost miraculous: How would a bird come to think that people could help her? Isn’t life simply bloodier than that? As Rob Dunn argues in The Call of the Honeyguide, it isn’t.

Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity - but we don't. Where is everybody? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: Is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?

Blending cutting-edge ideas with incisive spiritual insights, Evolutionaries is the first popular presentation of an emerging school of thought called "evolutionary spirituality". Carter Phipps, the former executive editor of EnlightenNext magazine, asserts that evolution is not only a scientific but also a spiritual idea in an audiobook whose message has the power to bring new meaning and purpose to life as we know it.

In Star Trek, crew members travel to unusual planets, meet diverse beings, and encounter unique civilizations. Throughout these remarkable space adventures, does Star Trek reflect biology and evolution as we know it? What can the science in the science fiction of Star Trek teach us? In Live Long and Evolve, biologist and die-hard Trekkie Mohamed Noor takes fans on a fun, fact-filled scientific journey. Noor offers Trekkies, science-fiction fans, and anyone curious about how life works a cosmic gateway into introductory biology.

How did humans, a species of self-centered apes, come to care about others? Since Darwin, scientists have tried to answer this question using evolutionary theory. In The Kindness of Strangers, psychologist Michael E. McCullough shows why they have failed and offers a new explanation instead. From the moment nomadic humans first settled down until the aftermath of the Second World War, our species has confronted repeated crises that we could only survive by changing our behavior.

‘What is it like to be a bat?’, the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked concerning consciousness. For biologist Martin Stevens, the question forms the starting point of an exploration of animal senses. In this enthralling account, we learn not only of the wonder of animal senses, but how they work and how scientists go about investigating them. And, throughout, we consider how these senses came to be.

Charles Darwin, el precursor de la literatura científica, expuso en El origen de las especies su famosa teoría de la biología evolutiva y la selección natural. Fue una publicación polémica que suscitó discusiones científicas, filosóficas y religiosas; sin embargo, hoy, la teoría moderna de la evolución acepta las tesis sobre la adaptación al medio ambiente de una especie para sobrevivir y su lenta, pero evidente, evolución.

منذ صدور هذا الكتاب لقي الكثير من الاستحسان حول العالم، وبخاصة من عامة الناس من غير المتخصصين في علم الأنثروبولوجيا، الذين لا يمكنهم قراءة الكتب الأكاديمية وبخاصة كتب التاريخ والأنثروبولوجيا المتخصصة جداً، فأسلوبه في الكتابة جاء سلساً وسهلاً وجعل الأفكار العلمية المعقدة قريبة للفهم، كما أنه دعم آراءه بمصادر علمية موثوقة من دون الجزم بصحتها تاركاً لمن يطّلع عليها إمكانية نقضها أو تطويرها حسب فكره الخاص ومنطقه وإدراكه للأمور.

A powerful treatise that demonstrates the existence of altruism in nature, with surprising implications for human society. Does altruism exist? Or is human nature entirely selfish? In this eloquent and accessible book, famed biologist David Sloan Wilson provides new answers to this age-old question based on the latest developments in evolutionary science.

In this engaging exploration, archaeologist Ian Hodder departs from the two prevailing modes of thought about human evolution: the older idea of constant advancement toward a civilized ideal and the newer one of a directionless process of natural selection. Instead, he proposes a theory of human evolution and history based on "entanglement," the ever-increasing mutual dependency between humans and things.

Spectacular fossil finds make today's headlines; new technology unlocks secrets of skeletons unearthed 100 years ago. Still, evolution is often poorly represented by the media and misunderstood by the public. A potent antidote to pseudoscience, Written in Stone is an engrossing history of evolutionary discovery for anyone who has marveled at the variety and richness of life.

In 1811, when the self-schooled daughter of a carpenter pulled some strange-looking bones from Britain's southern shoreline, few people dared to question that the Bible told the accurate history of the world. But Mary Anning had discovered the 'first' dinosaur, and over the next seventy-five years - as the science of palaeontology developed, as Charles Darwin posited theories of evolutionary biology, and as religious scholars identified the internal inconsistencies of the Scriptures - everything changed.

Fifty thousand years ago, we were not the only species of human in the world. There were at least four others, including the Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans. At the forefront of the latter's ground-breaking discovery was Oxford Professor Tom Higham. In The World Before Us, he explains the scientific and technological advancements.

Today's generation is bombarded with theories about humankind and its origins. The danger for Christians lies in the wealth of misinformation and miscommunication about simple biblical truths such as: (1) How and when the world began, (2) Whether humans are unique or merely a happenstance of evolution, (3) The distinction between humankind and other living creatures, (4) The evolution of life on this planet, and (5) The spiritual dimensions of the human soul.

For the last three billion years or so, life on Earth was shaped by natural forces. Evolution tended to happen slowly, with species crafted across millennia. Then, a few hundred thousand years ago, along came a bolshie, big-brained, bipedal primate we now call Homo sapiens, and with that, the Earth’s natural history came to an abrupt end. We are now living through the post-natural phase, where humans have become the leading force shaping evolution. This audiobook considers the many ways that we’ve altered the DNA of living things and changed the fate of life on earth.

Charles Darwin invirtió más de dos décadas en escribir El origen de las especies, la obra que marcó uno de los puntos de inflexión más importantes del pensamiento científico. A lo largo de este libro, Darwin expone su teoría de la selección natural y defiende que las especies no fueron creadas por una mano divina, sino que primero existieron unas formas más simples que a lo largo del tiempo fueron mutando y evolucionando para adaptarse al medio.

In Strange Survivors, biologist Oné R. Pagán takes us on a tour of the improbable, the ingenious, and the just plain bizarre ways that creatures fight for life. Inside this funny, fascinating field guide to nature’s most colorful characters, you’ll meet killer snails, social bacteria, and an animal with toxic elbows. But Strange Survivors is more than a collection of curiosities—it is a love letter to science and an argument for the continuing relevance of this evolutionary battle as we face the threat of resistant bacteria and the need for novel medical therapies.

Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the interplay of beauty, art, and culture in evolution. Taking inspiration from Darwin's observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have innate appreciation for beauty - and why nature is, indeed, beautiful.