Showing titles in Evolution & Genetics

What happens when your family tells you one thing, but a DNA test tells you another? Georgina Lawton grew up in a loving family but she didn’t look like anyone else. She has dark eyes, curly hair and brown skin. Both her parents were white. Georgina took a DNA test. The results changed her life forever. With millions around the world using 'do-it-yourself' DNA testing kits, Georgina follows the stories of those learning to live with the results.

Sleep has hardly changed since Paleolithic humans snoozed soundly in their caves. While sabre-toothed tigers were their biggest night-time worry, today it’s stress and social media that keep us awake, but the solutions are the same, and sleep therapist Dr Merijn van de Laar offers...

Scratch beneath the surface of a coffee bean, a red pepper flake, a poppy seed, a mold spore, a foxglove leaf, a magic-mushroom cap, a marijuana bud, or an apple seed, and we find a bevy of strange chemicals. We use these to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin), recover from surgery (opioids), cure infections (penicillin), mend our hearts (digoxin), bend our minds (psilocybin), calm our nerves (CBD), and even kill our enemies (cyanide). But why do plants and fungi produce such chemicals? And how did we come to use and abuse some of them?

A Next Big Idea Club Must Read of February 2025 From the author of The Social Leap comes this thought-provoking exploration into humans’ two core evolutionary needs, for connection and autonomy, how the modern world has thrown them out of whack, and how we can rebalance them to improve our...

Why cooperate? This may be the most important scientific question we have ever, and will ever, face. The science of cooperation tells us not only how we got here, but also where we might end up. Cooperation explains how strands of DNA gave rise to modern-day nation states. It defines our extraordinary ecological success, as well as many of the most surprising features of what make us human: not only why we live in families, why we have grandmothers and why women experience the menopause, but also why we become paranoid and jealous, and why we cheat. 

Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrdinger posed a simple, yet profound, question: What is life?. How could the very existence of such extraordinary chemical systems be understood? This problem has puzzled biologists and physical scientists both before, and ever since. Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently purposeful behaviour which we do not see in inert matter. So how does chemistry give rise to biology?

Cancer has always been with us. It killed our hominid ancestors, the mammals they evolved from and the dinosaurs that trampled the ground before that. Tumours grow in pets, livestock and wild animals. Even tiny jelly-like Hydra - creatures that are little more than a tube full of water - can get cancer. Paradoxically, many of us think of cancer as a contemporary killer, a disease of our own making caused by our modern lifestyles. 

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?

**Shortlisted for the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize** The bestselling author of Your Inner Fish takes readers on an epic adventure to the North and South Poles to reveal the secrets locked in the ice about life, the cosmos, and our planet’s future. “Urgent [and]...

Over five million years ago, a group of primates discovered tools. Perhaps it was a large rock, ideal for cracking nuts, or a stick to extract honey from a beehive. Regardless, the future of our planet was changed forever. Slowly, the primate evolved, abandoning the trees for solid ground and four legs for two–and the tools changed with it. Stones were sharpened, then attached to sticks, before stone gave way to bronze, iron, steel.

“You'll root for these creatures and their survival. A marvelous narration.”—Booklist “Paleontologist Riley Black’s vivid writing and Wren Mack’s wonderstruck narration make these vignettes of prehistoric life on Earth fascinating listening.”—AudioFile Winner, A Friend of Darwin...

Homo sapiens emerged as a species about 200,000 years ago and soon—with fire, simple tools, and an egalitarian social system—we inhabited every continent. But now our infinitely elaborated tools and our highly non-egalitarian social system threaten sustainability. Many at the bottom lose the desire to live, committing suicide or succumbing to drugs, alcohol, and obesity. What is Health? explains from the bottom up—molecules to society—how we reached this point.

Humans are the only mammals to walk on two, rather than four, legs. From an evolutionary perspective, this is an illogical development, as it slows us down. But here we are, suggesting there must have been something tremendous to gain from bipedalism. First Steps takes our ordinary, everyday...

For 100.000 år siden var Jorden beboet af mindst seks menneskearter. I dag er der kun en tilbage: Os. Homo sapiens. Hvorfor endte lige praecis vores art med at herske over kloden? Hvordan kunne vores jaeger- og samlerforfaedre enes om at bygge byer og skabe kongeriger? Hvorfor begyndte vi at tro på guder, nationer og menneskerettigheder? At have tillid til penge, bøger og love? Og vaere slaver af bureaukrati, tidsplaner og forbrugerisme? Og hvordan vil vores verden udvikle sig i det naeste årtusinde?

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How four tools enabled humanity to control its destiny What enabled us to go from simple stone tools to smartphones? How did bands of hunter-gatherers evolve into multinational empires? Listeners of Sapiens will say a cognitive revolution - a dramatic evolutionary change that altered our brains, turning primitive humans into modern ones - caused a cultural explosion. In Transcendence, Gaia Vince argues instead that modern humans are the product of a nuanced coevolution of our genes, environment, and culture that goes back into deep time.

Societies that ignore social disintegration and collapsing birth rates are putting their future in peril. So why are we ignoring the signs? ?In The Origin Of Politics, Nicholas Wade explains how our political systems compete with a more ancient set of rules for organizing society—those...

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year A breakthrough investigation of synthetic biology: the promising and controversial technology platform that combines biology and artificial intelligence and has the potential to program biological systems like we program computers. The breakthrough science of...

Charles Darwin's foremost biographer, Janet Browne, delivers a vivid and accessible introduction to the book that permanently altered our understanding of what it is to be human. A sensation on its publication in 1859, The Origin of the Species profoundly shocked Victorian readers by calling into question the belief in a Creator with its description of evolution through natural selection. And Darwin's seminal work is nearly as controversial today.

Nature is rife with cheating. Possums play possum, feigning death to cheat predators. Crows cry wolf to scare off rivals. Amphibians and reptiles are inveterate impostors. Even genes and cells cheat. The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars explores the evolution of cheating in the natural world, revealing how dishonesty has given rise to wondrous diversity.