Natural Science / Natural History > Evolution

'What the hell am I doing here?' It's not just a question about the wisdom of standing alone in one of the most inhospitable places on earth. 'What the hell am I doing here?' becomes the BIG QUESTION: and soon acts like the South Pole to Davis. It sets him on a quest for meaning, in a world that still pitches theories of evolution against belief in a Creator; the science of natural selection against a faith that asserts our world was crafted by Intelligent Design. Part memoir, part biography of Charles Darwin, the great originator ... read more

Powerful new research methods are providing fresh and vivid insights into the makeup of life. Comparing gene sequences, examining the atomic structure of proteins and looking into the geochemistry of rocks have all helped to explain creation and evolution in more detail than ever before. Nick Lane uses the full extent of this new knowledge to describe the ten greatest inventions of life, based on their historical impact, role in living organisms today and relevance to current controversies. DNA, sex, sight and consciousnesses are j... read more

Powerful new research methods are providing fresh and vivid insights into the makeup of life. Comparing gene sequences, examining the atomic structure of proteins and looking into the geochemistry of rocks have all helped to explain creation and evolution in more detail than ever before. Nick Lane uses the full extent of this new knowledge to describe the ten greatest inventions of life, including DNA, sex, sight and consciousness, based on their historical impact, role in living organisms today and relevance to current controversi... read more

This is a groundbreaking attack on the most influential scientific orthodoxy of the last 150 years. Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, a distinguished philosopher and scientist working in tandem, reveal major flaws at the heart of Darwinian evolutionary theory. They do not deny Darwin's status as an outstanding scientist but question the inferences he drew from his observations. Combining the results of cutting-edge work in experimental biology with crystal-clear philosophical argument they mount a devastating critique of ... read more

With breathtaking speed our species has undergone fundamental changes that have transformed us into what David Suzuki and Holly Dressel call a superspecies. As we enter the new millennium our impact on the ecological features of this planet will dominate our priorities and actions. Nevertheless, as we hurtle towards catastrophic breakdown of the earth's life support systems, social, political and economic leaders and scholars continue to ignore the central role of the environment in their decisions and actions. Naked Ape to Supe... read more

Alice Roberts has been travelling the world - from Ethiopian desert to Malay peninsula and from Russian steppes to Amazon basin - in order to understand the challenges that early humans faced as they tried to settle continents. On her travels she has witnessed some of the daunting and brutal challenges our ancestors had to face: mountains, deserts, oceans, changing climates, terrifying giant beasts and volcanoes. But she discovers that perhaps the most serious threat of all came from other humans. When our ancestors set out from Af... read more

The astonishing new discovery that could change everything ...Lying inside a high-security vault, deep within the heart of one of the world's leading natural history museums, is the scientific find of a lifetime - a perfectly fossilized early primate, older than the previously most famous primate fossil, Lucy, by an astonishing forty-four million years. A secret until now, the fossil 'Ida' is the most complete early primate fossil ever found. Forty-seven million years old, Ida rewrites what we've assumed about the earliest primate ... read more

The Origin of Species is the most famous book in science but its stature tends to obscure the genius of Charles Darwin's other works. The Beagle voyage, too, occupied only five of the fifty years of his career. He spent only five weeks on the Galapagos and on his return never left Britain again. Darwin wrote six million words, in nineteen books and innumerable letters, on topics as different as dogs, barnacles, insect-eating plants, orchids, earthworms, apes and human emotion. Together, they laid the foundations of modern biology. ... read more

A fascinating and incisive examination of our language instinct. Along with the concepts of consciousness and intelligence, our capacity for language sits right at the core of what makes us human. But while the evolutionary origins of language have provoked speculation and impassioned debate, music has been neglected if not ignored. Like language it is a universal feature of human culture, one that is a permanent fixture in our daily lives. In The Singing Neanderthal, Steven Mithen redresses the balance, drawing on a huge rang... read more

THE ANCESTOR'S TALE is a pilgrimage back through time; a journey on which we meet up with fellow pilgrims as we and they converge on our common ancestors. Chimpanzees join us at about 6 million years in the past, gorillas at 7 million years, orang utans at 14 million years, as we stride on together, a growing band. The journey provides the setting for a collection of some 40 tales. Each explores an aspect of evolutionary biology through the stories of characters met along the way or glimpsed from afar - the Elephant Bird's Tale, th... read more

The most authoritative, comprehensive, succinct summary of evolution available Written in a no-nonsense, accessible style for the general reader Author is founding father of modern genetic and evolutionary theory - he has written 13 books, and published more than 700 scientific papers Ernst Mayr has been on the faculty of Harvard University since 1953 Evolution is the most important idea in biology, with implications that go far beyond science. But despite more than a century's progress in understanding, there is still widesp... read more

Find the answer to pretty much everything you've ever wanted to know but never had enough Dutch courage to ask! You know how it is... you're at a party, you've had a drink or two, and then someone introduces you to a friend. He's a doctor. And it seems like the perfect time to ask all those strange questions you've always wondered about, but never had the courage to ask: Can poppy seeds make you test positive for heroin? What are goosebumps? Why does asparagus make your wee smell? Why do old people get hairy ears? Is i... read more

Ten years ago, Darwin's Black Box launched the Intelligent Design movement: the argument that nature exhibits evidence of design, beyond Darwinian randomness. Today, the movement is stronger than ever, and the book is a classic and an international bestseller. At last, Michael Behe has updated the book with a major new afterword on the state of the debate. The Intelligent Design movement was born when a handful of scientists realized that nature exhibits characteristics that could not have evolved by random mutation. Prominen... read more

The Cambrian explosion is the 'big bang' of evolution - a period of just 5 million years during which life on Earth rapidly developed both armaments and defences, and animals suddenly became both hunters and hunted. But why did the explosion happen when it did? Gound-breaking, readable and accessible, Oxford zoologist Andrew Parker's fascinating account of how he solved the Cambrian enigma unfolds with the excitement of a top-notch whodunnit.

Award-winning science writer, Carl Zimmer, takes us on an amazing journey back in time - and into the future - to look at where human beings came from and where we may be going.Humanity has always been intrigued by the timeless question: Where did we come from? In 1974, the discovery of the fossilised bones of a three-million-year-old female dubbed 'Lucy' captured the world's attention. This nearly complete skeleton of an early human ancestor not only triggered widespread interest in our human origins but also prompted a thorough... read more

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As he examines everything from species survival on islands to vegetarian piranhas, Quammen's funny and offbeat essays offer a unique glimpse of the natural world and, at the same time, clarify the larger biological issues and their effect on humankind.

A labor of love and enthusiasm as well as deep scientific knowledge, "Right Hand, Left Hand" takes the reader on a trip through history, around the world, and into the cosmos, to explore the place of handedness in nature and culture. Chris McManus considers evidence from anthropology, particle physics, the history of medicine, and the notebooks of Leonardo to answer questions like: Why are most people right-handed? Are left-handed people cognitively different from right-handers? Why is the heart almost always on the left side of th... read more

'It is no accident that we see green almost wherever we look. It is no accident that we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life; no accident that we are surrounded by millions of other species, eating, growing, rotting, swimming, walking, flying, burrowing, stalking, chasing, fleeing, outpacing, outwitting . We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection - t... read more

A wonderfully accessible, up-to-the-minute account of human evolution by 'one of the most respected evolutionary psychologists in Britain'(Guardian). Of the dozen or so hominid species once in existence, why are we the only one to have survived? What is it that sets us so firmly apart from all the other creatures with whom we share the planet? How and when did that separation come about? About the Author: Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Liverpool and has held fellowships at the Unive... read more