Genetic History

In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared.

From the very beginning, life on Earth has been defined by war. Today, those first wars continue to be fought around and literally inside us, influencing our individual behavior and that of civilization as a whole. War between populations - whether between different species or between rival groups of humans - is seen as an inevitable part of the evolutionary process. The popular concept of "the survival of the fittest" explains and often excuses these actions.

This book explores how Charles Darwin and his Theory of Evolution were a product of the nineteenth-century reductive mindset.

Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative.

The New York Times best-selling author of Darwin’s Doubt presents groundbreaking scientific evidence of the existence of God, based on breakthroughs in physics, cosmology, and biology.

Our species has amassed unprecedented knowledge of nature, which we have tried to use to seize control of life and bend the planet to our will. In A Natural History of the Future, biologist Rob Dunn argues that such efforts are futile. We may see ourselves as life’s overlords, but we are instead at its mercy. In the evolution of antibiotic resistance, the power of natural selection to create biodiversity, and even the surprising life of the London Underground, Dunn finds laws of life that no human activity can annul.

Nazi spies, genetic engineering, and the Fourth Reich Near the end of World War II, a German U-boat deposited two Nazi saboteurs on the coast of Maine. History tells us they were quickly captured. But what if there was a third man? An ultrasecret agent with a long-term mission known only to a select few in the Nazi high command. Men who anticipated the ways that genetic engineering could someday be used to help launch a Fourth Reich. Amidst the turbulent events of twentieth-century America, the third man partners with a geneticist and the Ku Klux Klan to weaponize the emerging science of ...

In this landmark medical narrative, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher chronicle the story of Nic Volker, the Wisconsin boy at the center of a daring breakthrough in medicine - a complete gene sequencing to discover the cure for an otherwise undiagnosable illness.

Charles Darwin’s theories, first published more than 150 years ago, still set the paradigm of how we understand the evolution of life—but scientific advances of recent decades have radically altered that understanding. In fact the currently accepted history of life on Earth is flawed and out of date. Now two pioneering scientists, one already an award-winning popular author, deliver an eye-opening narrative that synthesizes a generation’s worth of insights from new research.

A giant of archaeology, Colin Renfrew has immeasurably improved our understanding of human history. In this passionately argued work, he offers a concise summary of prehistory - human existence that predates the development of written records - while challenging the very definition of prehistory itself.

Control is a book about what geneticist Adam Rutherford calls “a defining idea of the twentieth century.” Inspired by Darwin’s ideas about evolution, eugenics arose in Victorian England as a theory for improving the British population, and quickly spread to America. With disarming wit and scientific precision, Rutherford explains why eugenics still figures prominently in the twenty-first century, despite its genocidal past. And he confronts insidious recurring questions, revealing the intellectual bankruptcy of the idea, and the scientific impossibility of its realization.

Exogenesis: Hybrid Humans offers a deep dive into the strongest ever scientific evidence that supports the popular belief that Earth has been visited in prehistory, but goes even further, concluding that there is also compelling evidence of alien involvement with the human genome. The broader history of possible extraterrestrial contact is explored alongside a look at current events in the subject of alien disclosure with the result of highlighting evidence of a contact continuum that has continued since the dawn of humanity.

This paradigm-shifting book paints a spirited portrait of a restless people that challenges our established ways of looking at Europe's past. The story is more complex than at first believed, with new evidence suggesting that the European gene pool was stirred vigorously multiple times. Genetic clues are also enhancing our understanding of European mobility in epochs with written records, including the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, the spread of the Slavs, and the adventures of the Vikings.

This is a story about you. It is the history of who you are and how you came to be. It is unique to you, as it is for every one of the 100 billion modern humans who has ever drawn breath. But it is also our collective story, because in each of our genomes we carry the history of the whole of our species.

In the mid-1970s, scientists began using DNA sequences to reexamine the history of all life. Perhaps the most startling discovery to come out of this new field is horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or the movement of genes across species lines. For instance, we now know that roughly eight percent of the human genome arrived not through traditional inheritance from directly ancestral forms, but sideways by viral infection - a type of HGT. In The Tangled Tree David Quammen chronicles these discoveries through the lives of the researchers who made them.

When we talk about human history, we often focus on great leaders, population forces, and decisive wars. But how has the earth itself determined our destiny? Our planet wobbles, driving changes in climate that forced the transition from nomadism to farming. Mountainous terrain led to the development of democracy in Greece. Atmospheric circulation patterns later on shaped the progression of global exploration, colonization, and trade. Even today, voting behavior in the southeast United States ultimately follows the underlying pattern of 75 million-year-old sediments from an ancient sea.

We humans are the inheritors of a dynasty that has reigned over the planet for nearly 66 million years, through fiery cataclysm and ice ages: the mammals. Our lineage includes saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, armadillos the size of a car, cave bears three times the weight of a grizzly, clever scurriers that outlasted Tyrannosaurus rex, and even other types of humans, like Neanderthals.

Discover an alternate history to the human race as the authors of Forbidden Archeology challenge one of the most fundamental components of the modern scientific world view. Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson discuss the work of researchers who, over the past 2 centuries, have found bones and artifacts showing that people like ourselves existed on earth millions of years ago.

Who are we? How do scientists define Homo sapiens, and how does our species differ from the extinct hominins that came before us? In this accessible account palaeoarchaeologist Paul Pettitt shows how the latest scientific advances, especially in genetics, are revolutionizing our understanding of human evolution. Pettitt reveals the extraordinary story of how our ancestors adapted to unforgiving and relentlessly changing climates, leading to remarkable innovations in art, technology, and society that we are only now beginning to comprehend.

A fierce sandstorm hits southern Algeria and uncovers a lost ruin, its location unknown to modern man...until now. A team led by slacker archaeologist, Harrison "Hank" Boyd, is called in to investigate the find. In way over his head, Hank must lead his team through countless dangers and survive brutal encounters with enemies both human and inhuman alike. And if that's not bad enough, a shadowy group with a thirst for violence and a blind ambition is hot on their heels and will stop at nothing to obtain what has been found. Hank and company should have heeded the warning left by the ancient ...