What use is biodiversity, and does it matter if species die out? These controversial questions arouse considerable debate. Most people believe they represent a moral dilemma, but The Pursuit of Complexity shows that it is possible to explore them in a scientific way. Author Gerard Jagers op Akkerhuis takes us back to the underlying fundamental questions: What actually is usefulness, or utility? What is evolution? What is life? What is biodiversity? And how important are human beings in all...

"Coyne's knowledge of evolutionary biology is prodigious, his deployment of it as masterful as his touch is light." -Richard DawkinsIn the current debate about creationism and intelligent design, there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned-the evidence. Yet the proof of evolution by natural selection is vast, varied, and magnificent. In this succinct and accessible summary of the facts supporting the theory of natural selection, Jerry A. Coyne d...

A fully updated edition of one of the most original accounts of evolution ever written.'Extraordinarily detailed, serious and engaging' Daily Mail'One of the richest accounts of evolution ever' Financial Times'Dizzying . . . fresh, exhilarating' Daily TelegraphThe Ancestor's Tale is a dazzling, four-billion-year pilgrimage to the origins of us all. Richard...

How did the replication bomb we call ”life” begin and where in the world, or rather, in the universe, is it heading? Writing with characteristic wit and an ability to clarify complex phenomena (the New York Times described his style as ”the sort of science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius”), Richard Dawkins confronts this ancient mystery.

Are plants intelligent? Can they solve problems, communicate, and navigate their surroundings? Or are they passive, incapable of independent action or social behavior? Philosophers and scientists have pondered these questions since ancient Greece, most often concluding that plants are unthinking and inert: they are too silent, too sedentary -- just too different from us. Yet discoveries over the past fifty years have challenged these ideas, shedding new light on the extraordinary capabilit...

In this New York Times bestseller, "you'll see star births described in pen and ink, antimatter realized in collage, and a hand-painted black hole" ( Discover Magazine).A science book like no other, The Where, the Why, and the How turns loose seventy-five of today's hottest artists onto life's vast questions, from how we got here to where we are going. Inside these pages some of the biggest (and smallest) mysteries of the natural world are explaine...

Take a mind blowing journey beyond the furthest stars, from the Big Bang to the end of time. Witness the evolution of complexity, from organic chemistry to the Dinosaurs. Probe the deepest recesses of the human mind in search consciousness itself. It's all here in this dazzling first volume of Henry Kong's history of the Universe.

• Is there really such a thing as a blue moon?• What time is it at the North Pole?• Why don’t woodpeckers get concussed?• Why don’t snorers wake themselves with the racket they make?• Do insects sleep?These are just a few of the intriguing questions asked and answered in The Quirks & Quarks Question Book, the first question and answer book to come out of CBC Radio’s enormously popular weekly science program. Quirks & Quarks producers ha...

Although Charles Darwin's theory of evolution laid the foundations of modern biology, it did not tell the whole story. Most remarkably, The Origin of Species said very little about, of all things, the origins of species. Darwin and his modern successors have shown very convincingly how inherited variations are naturally selected, but they leave unanswered how variant organisms come to be in the first place. In Symbiotic Planet, renowned scientist Lynn Margulis shows that ...

At once a spirited defense of Darwinian explanations of biology and an elegant primer on evolution for the general reader, What Evolution Is poses the questions at the heart of evolutionary theory and considers how our improved understanding of evolution has affected the viewpoints and values of modern man. Science Masters Series

We not only share nearly 99% of our genes with chimps, we also have some 35% in common with daffodils. Throughout much of the animal and even plant kingdoms, almost the same ancient genes code for almost the same proteins. And further, to everyone's astonishment, the genes involved in making the complex eyes of fruitflies are close matches to those involved in making the very different eyes of octopuses and people. So what leads to the nature's 'endless forms most beautiful'?The key...

In this groundbreaking book, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan present an answer to one of the enduring mysteries of evolution -- the source of inherited variation that gives rise to new species. Random genetic mutation, long believed to be the main source of variation, is only a marginal factor. As the authors demonstrate in this book, the more important source of speciation, by far, is the acquisition of new genomes by symbiotic merger. The result of thirty years of delving into a vast, mos...