. . . Gould is the Stan Musial of essay writing. He can work himself into a corkscrew of ideas and improbable allusions paragraph after paragraph and then, uncoiling, hit it with such power that his fans know they are experiencing the game of essay writing at its best."--John Noble Wilford, New York Times Book Review

    The authors bring to life Darwin's reckless student days in Cambridge, his epic five-year voyage on the Beagle, and his grueling struggle to develop his theory of evolution.Adrian Desmond and James Moore's gripping narrative reveals the great personal cost to Darwin of pursuing inflammatory truths—telling the whole story of how he came to his epoch-making conclusions.

    Now, faced with the threat of nuclear weapons and the effects of climate change, it seems our innate tendencies for violence and invention have led us to a crucial fork in our road. Where did these traits come from? Are they part of our species immutable destiny? Or is there hope for our species’ future if we change? With fascinating facts and his unparalleled readability, Diamond intended his book to improve the world that today’s young people will inherit. Triangle Square’s The Third Chimpanzee for Young People is a book for future generation and the future they’ll help build.

    This bold and brilliant book asks the ultimate question of the life sciences: How did the human mind acquire its incomparable power? In seeking the answer, Merlin Donald traces the evolution of human culture and cognition from primitive apes to artificial intelligence, presenting an enterprising and original theory of how the human mind evolved from its presymbolic form.

    In his new collection of essays, Bateson, author of the enormously influential book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, takes readers further along the pathways by which he arrived at his now-famous synthesis, and continues to illuminate such diverse fields as biology, anthropology, psychiatry, and linguistics.

    Jordan opens our eyes to the natural laws that rule men as well as animals, and asks the illuminating question: What is our role in this fearfully beautifully world?

    Using this example as a springboard, David M. Raup leaps into an egaging discussion of the theories, assumptions, and difficulties associated with the science of species extinction. Woven is along the way are stories of the trilobite eye, tropical reefs, flying reptiles, and the fate of the heath hen on Martha's Vineyard, a very modern extinction.

    Its effects on our view of life have been wide and deep. One of the most world-shaking books ever published, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, first appeared in print over 130 years ago, and it touched off a debate that rages to this day.Every modern evolutionist turns to Darwin's work again and again. Current controversies in the life sciences very often have as their starting point some vagueness in Darwin's writings or some question Darwin was unable to answer owing to the insufficient biological knowledge available during his time. Despite the intense study of Darwin's life and work, however, many of us cannot explain his theories (he had several separate ones) and the evidence and reasoning behind them, nor do we appreciate the modifications of the Darwinian paradigm that have kept it viable throughout the twentieth century.Who could elucidate the subtleties of Darwin's thought and that of his contemporaries and intellectual heirs--A. R. Wallace, T. H. Huxley, August Weismann, Asa Gray--better than Ernst Mayr, a man considered by many to be the greatest evolutionist of the century? In this gem of historical scholarship, Mayr has achieved a remarkable distillation of Charles Darwin's scientific thought and his enormous legacy to twentieth-century biology. Here we have an accessible account of the revolutionary ideas that Darwin thrust upon the world. Describing his treatise as "one long argument," Darwin definitively refuted the belief in the divine creation of each individual species, establishing in its place the concept that all of life descended from a common ancestor. He proposed the idea that humans were not the special products of creation but evolved according to principles that operate everywhere else in the living world; he upset current notions of a perfectly designed, benign natural world and substituted in their place the concept of a struggle for survival; and he introduced probability, chance, and uniqueness into scientific discourse.This is an important book for students, biologists, and general readers interested in the history of ideas--especially ideas that have radically altered our worldview. Here is a book by a grand master that spells out in simple terms the historical issues and presents the controversies in a manner that makes them understandable from a modern perspective.

    A universally appealing subject presented with clarity, creativity, and conviction.--Booklist. Lynn Margulis is a leading evolutonary biologist and Sagan is a writer.

    This rhythm of life--a concept developed by Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould known as punctuated equilibria in evolution-- is revealed by the fossilized remains of the earth's ancient flora and fauna. Distinguished photographer Murray Alcosser augments Eldredge's text with 160 luminous color plates illustrating more than 250 different fossil specimens. In this new paperback edition, Fossils becomes an accessible text with appeal to a broad audience, including natural history readers and students.

    Labelled 'living fossils' by Darwin, the ancient animals and plants Peter Ward explores have survived with little or no change the cataclysmic events that transformed life on earth. These 'Methuselahs' can tell us much about the history of life and about the great extinction periods in which so many other species died out.

    It relates the history of chemicals, from the earliest generation of the light elements in the Big Bang, to their transformation into heavier atoms and their subsequent molecular evolution intomyriad forms, including life on Earth. Spanning both organic and inorganic chemical combinations, the survey thus covers billions of years and involves evidence coming from the analysis of long-extinct as well as ongoing processes. The techniques used in this fascinating study are also described.They include the analysis of many sources: isotopes from ancient nuclear reactions and still-active radionuclides; molecules from space--frozen in meteorites or continuously generated in vast interstellar clouds; and the detritus of volcanic and geochemical activity. This is also the story of theorigin of life, which can be biochemically detected through the modern descendants of early microbial life-forms and from laboratory experiments in prebiotic chemistry. The author also describes the history of ideas in the study of chemistry and the development of modern theories on chemicalevolution. This is a highly readable account of central issues and ideas in modern science that will be read with absorbing interest by a wide range of students, researchers, and general readers.

    A completely new set of contributions has been brought together once more to take account of the many exciting new developments in the field. Each chapter presents a balanced view of the subject, integrating a clear exposition of the theory with a critical discussion of how predictions have been tested by experiments and comparative studies. In addition, the book points to unreconciled issues and possible future developments. Edited by two of the most highly regarded experts in the field, this new volume contains contributions from an international authorship and continues the tradition of clarity and accessibility established by the three previous editions. The latest edition of a classic in behavioural ecology.Divided into three sections: Mechanisms and Individual Behaviour, From Individual Behaviour to Social Systems, and Life Histories, Phylogenies and Populations.Contributions from the world's leading researchers.

    Since that time, the sciences have specialized into physics, chemistry, biology and geology - specialization that has brought advances, but has unfortunately obscured our view of the unique role that life and death play on our planet.

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