"Darwin outlines his theory of evolution, which proposed that species had been evolving and differentiating over time under the influence of natural selection." --

"The author of the best-selling Your Inner Fish, now gives us a lively and accessible account of the great transformations in the history of life, that enable us to further understand whether our presence on this planet is an accident or inevitable. The great transformations in the history of life brought about whole scale shifts in how animals live and how their bodies are organized: the evolution of fish to land-living creature, the origin of birds,...

"Dip below the ocean's surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom--the Metazoa--they can teach us much about the evolutionary...

In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species--births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. But those stories have always been locked away--until now. Who are our ancestors? Where did they come from? Geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has blown the lid off what we thought we knew. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely...

"For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all our inventions--our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations--we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society. In Blueprint, Nicholas...

BONUS: This edition contains a The Coral Thief discussion guide and an excerpt from Rebecca Stott's Ghostwalk.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND BOOKLIST

Paris, 1815. Daniel Connor, a young medical student from Edinburgh, has arrived to study anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes--only to realize that his letters of introduction and precious coral specimens, on which his tenure

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Edward J. Larson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and eminent science historian. This marvelously readable, yet sumptuously erudite work traces the development of the scientific theory of evolution. From Darwin's essential trip to the GalApagos, to the most contemporary studies in sociobiology, this work takes listeners both into the field and laboratories of the world's greatest evolutionary scientists, and shows how the theory of evolution has...

"Any reader of science fiction or viewer of Star Trek will be awake to the dream that there may be life elsewhere in our universe that isn't like life here on Earth. Maybe, like E.T., it has new letters in its genetic alphabet! Maybe it's made of silicon! Maybe it gets around on wheels! Or maybe it doesn't. In The Equations of Life, biologist Charles Cockell makes the surprising argument that the Universe constrains life, making its evolutionary outcomes...

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.

From an evolutionary viewpoint, Wilson argues, altruism is inextricably

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Explains how the natural world arose without a designer and challenges the basic assumptions of world religions to argue that faith is not a necessary component of good behavior.