Showing titles in Evolution & Genetics

The eagerly anticipated conclusion to Peter Godfrey-Smith’s three-part exploration of the origins of intelligence on Earth, which began with the bestselling Other Minds in 2018 and continued with Metazoa in 2020. The eagerly anticipated conclusion to Peter Godfrey-Smith’s three-part...

Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative.

Are men literally born to cheat? Does monogamy actually serve women's interests? These are among the questions that have made The Moral Animal one of the most provocative science books in recent years. Wright unveils the genetic strategies behind everything from our sexual preferences to our office politics - as well as their implications for our moral codes and public policies.

Before the Pilgrims landed at Cape Cod, what was happening in North America? Who was there? What civilizations rose and fell? For years, the answers to these questions have been shrouded in mystery. At the time of European contact, a diverse world of Native peoples thrived across the continent. What was their backstory? Who were the ancestors of the Sioux? Where did the Navajo come from? What about the Apache, the Comanche, the Cherokee?

Unlocking the Code of Life: Just What Exactly Is CRISPR Technology? by Jorik Malvern is an extraordinary exploration of one of the most revolutionary scientific breakthroughs of the modern age. Clear, engaging, and deeply informative, this book takes listeners on a journey from the discovery of DNA to the dawn of genetic editing — a story that transforms our understanding of life itself.

Matt Ridley, acclaimed author of the classics Genome and Nature via Nurture, turns from investigating human nature to investigating human progress. In The Rational Optimist Ridley offers a counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our age, and proves, however much we like to think to the...

Flight fascinates us. We thrill to birds, we adore butterflies, we're baffled by bats and we can hardly believe in pterodactyls. Barnes looks at the physics of flight and how it has evolved quite separately four times over (birds, bats, insects and pterosaurs). He examines how these creatures do it: from the nocturnal agility of bats and the extinct reptile quetzalcoatlus with its 33-foot wingspan, to barely competent pheasants.

Perched on the exterior of our delicate and intricate bodies, the skin is our largest and fastest growing organ. We see it, touch it and live in it every day. It's a habitat for a mesmerisingly complex world of micro-organisms, its physical functions are vital to our health and indeed our survival, and it's crucial to our sense of identity. Yet how much do we really know about it? Through the lenses of science, sociology and history, Dr Monty Lyman leads us on a journey through the comedy, tragedy and exquisite humanity of our most underrated and overlooked organ.

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.

From intelligence to emotion, for centuries science has told us that men and women are fundamentally different. But this is not the whole story. Shedding light on controversial research and investigating the ferocious gender wars in biology, psychology and anthropology, Angela Saini takes...

In his new book, acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley looks to the peculiar mating rituals of birds to better understand the rich origins and ongoing significance of Darwin's sexual selection theory. 'FASCINATING' The Times ‘Matt Ridley is one of our finest science writers … A treat for bird...

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Bully for Brontosaurus and learn about natural history.

In The Genetic Lottery, Harden introduces listeners to the latest genetic science, dismantling dangerous ideas about racial superiority and challenging us to grapple with what equality really means in a world where people are born different. Weaving together personal stories with scientific evidence, Harden shows why our refusal to recognize the power of DNA perpetuates the myth of meritocracy, and argues that we must acknowledge the role of genetic luck if we are ever to create a fair society.

'Jackie Higgins’s lyrical, literate style will charm you while her book stuns your imagination with strange, other-worldly truths' Richard Dawkins Sentient assembles a menagerie of zoological creatures – from land, air, sea and all four corners of the globe – to understand what it means to...

Geneticists like David Reich have made astounding advances in the field of genomics, which is proving to be as important as archaeology, linguistics, and written records as a means to understand our ancestry. In Who We Are and How We Got Here, Reich allows listeners to discover how the human genome provides not only all the information a human embryo needs to develop but also the hidden story of our species.

How can our ears listen to this audiobook with such precision, differentiating each specific word? How can we understand thoughts someone has transferred to the track? With our union of dexterity and brain power, we discovered ways of finding food and beating the elements not only in our home on...

Brought to you by Penguin. From the award-winning scientist who identified the bones of Richard III in a Leicester carpark and genetically analysed Hitler, discover the myth-busting book that provides a window into the world of modern genetics and reveals the extraordinary true stories and...

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. 

First coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation. Susan Blackmore shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began, a survival of the fittest amongst competing ideas and behaviors. Ideas and behaviors that proved most adaptive-making tools, for example, or using language - survived and flourished, replicating themselves in as many minds as possible.

The New York Times bestselling author of Darwin’s Doubt presents groundbreaking scientific evidence of the existence of God, based on breakthroughs in physics, cosmology, and biology. Beginning in the late 19th century, many intellectuals began to insist that scientific knowledge conflicts...