Genetic Science

Arthur Winter, his wife, and daughter move to Rapture with the promise of a better life, and more importantly a new start. He intends to work hard and one day be wealthy just like Ryan promises everyone who moves to Rapture. He opens a small business. For a few years things are good, almost idyllic. The good life is shattered when one day his daughter mysteriously vanishes without a trace. The police of Rapture don't seem to want to help. So Arthur sets out to find her himself.

After a brazen rescue mission to the Citadel, the crew of the Trash Squid have rescued Captain Axel Finn. During their escape, a dying Admiral Jessup tells Axel he must lead the resistance, and that he must start it where his father made his last stand, on the mining world of Furia. On the planet Runi, Sergeant Jax Brito returns to her family farm to find her father on his deathbed. After dealing with the thugs that put him there, her trip is cut short when a Clipper arrives with a message—the Citadel has been attacked and forces are gathering to take it back.

Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution.

Religious fundamentalists and biblical literalists present any number of arguments that attempt to disprove evolution. Those with a sympathetic ear often fail to critically examine these creationist claims, leading to an ill-informed public and, perhaps more troubling, ill-advised public policy. As Aron Ra makes clear, however, every single argument deployed by creationists in their attacks on evolution is founded on fundamental scientific, religious, and historical falsehoods - all of them.

The Ancestor's Tale is a pilgrimage back through time - a journey on which we meet up with fellow pilgrims as we and they converge on our common ancestors. Chimpanzees join us at about six million years in the past, gorillas at seven million years, orangutans at 14 million years, as we stride on together, a growing band. The journey provides the setting for a collection of some 40 tales.

Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of “urban ecologists” studying how our manmade environments are accelerating and changing the evolution of the animals and plants around us. In Darwin Comes to Town, he takes us around the world for an up-close look at just how stunningly flexible and swift-moving natural selection can be.

Mahina's terraformers built a high-tech urban paradise. Then Earth flooded the colony with desperate refugees, cop Sass Collier among them. The settlers who arrived with Sass died decades ago. Outside the citadel, their descendants die weak and young.

For five centuries, human life has been restricted to Earth, while posthuman descendants called alloys freely explore the galaxy. But when the Earthlike planet of Meru is discovered, two unlikely companions venture forth to test the habitability of this unoccupied new world and the future of human-alloy relations. For Jayanthi, the adopted human child of alloy parents, it’s an opportunity to rectify the ancient reputation of her species as avaricious and destructive, and to give humanity a new place in the universe.

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 Galápagos, 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 itself evolved.

Hundreds of years after a plague-induced apocalypse collapsed civilization back to iron and horsepower, the Hyllises have a genetic tendency to inherit “talents”. Eva Hyllis and her ancestors became healers because their talents let them feel inside their patients. This helped them diagnose the underlying causes of many illnesses. Eva’s children Tarc and Daussie have inherited telekinetic and teleportation talents.

Haleck Cain fights free of a failing life pod only to learn the space station he doesn’t recognize is in a degrading orbit. Battling for basic survival, he quickly realizes nothing is as it should be. He’s alone, damaged, and surrounded by new enemies. Ten years have passed and the civilization he helped build is in ruins. Cain’s search for his friends will take him to the most dangerous parts of Maglan and reveal a secret he never suspected.

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.

When Asha said she wanted to give the Chinese hackers a piece of her mind, she didn’t mean it literally. But that’s what happens when medical technology goes awry. Doctors said they could train her brain to interpret digital signals from the camera in her artificial eye. The module even has Wi-Fi so they can monitor signal traffic across her optic nerve. What they didn’t anticipate was that her brain would figure out how to use the Wi-Fi connection both ways. Asha can now see the internet.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution now forms the basis for all the life sciences, but it ignited widespread controversy upon its 1859 publication. The idea that humans and animals might have evolved from a common source came as a shock to readers at the time, and people struggle with the implications of Darwin’s theory to this day. But Darwin foresaw this resistance and argued his case with extensive examples and rigorous logic - and his theory continues to push us toward a deeper understanding of life on Earth.

In The Genealogical Adam and Eve, S. Joshua Swamidass tests a scientific hypothesis: What if the traditional account is somehow true, with the origins of Adam and Eve taking place alongside evolution? Building on well-established but overlooked science, Swamidass explains how it's possible for Adam and Eve to be rightly identified as the ancestors of everyone.

Too many years of hunting psychotic vampires night after night have left Rachel with a need for change. So when the opportunity to travel across the galaxy aboard a Lasaran warship to a utopian planet arises, the powerful Immortal Guardian jumps at the chance. Rachel eagerly looks forward to making a fresh start . . . until an enemy attacks and she ends up alone in an escape pod so far from alliance-occupied space that no one can hear her communications. No one except a renegade cyborg who shouldn't exist.

When young programmer Alexander Ivanovich Privalov picks up two hitchhikers while driving in Karelia, he is drawn into the mysterious world of the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy, where research into magic is serious business.

The scientific evidence behind why maintaining a lifestyle more like that of our ancestors will restore our health and well-being. In Go Wild, Harvard Medical School Professor John Ratey, MD, and journalist Richard Manning reveal that although civilization has rapidly evolved, our bodies have not kept pace.

The scientist who has been dubbed the “Father of Intelligent Design” and author of the groundbreaking book Darwin’s Black Box contends that recent scientific discoveries further disprove Darwinism and strengthen the case for an intelligent creator.

Where did I come from? Why do I have two arms but just one head? How is my left leg the same size as my right one? Why are the fingerprints of identical twins not identical? How did my brain learn to learn? Why must I die? Questions like these remain biology's deepest and most ancient challenges. They force us to confront a fundamental biological problem: How can something as large and complex as a human body organize itself from the simplicity of a fertilized egg?